


Something Good

by burlesquecomposer



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Galaxy Garrison, Garrison trio, Gen, Pre-Canon, Team Bonding, it's not a songfic but there's a song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-12-10 13:40:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11692803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burlesquecomposer/pseuds/burlesquecomposer
Summary: Pidge has a burden to bear, a mission to complete—a family to save.She picks up another one along the way.*Request!





	Something Good

**Author's Note:**

  * For [loozers19](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loozers19/gifts).



> Commission request from Soph, who wanted precanon and canon compliant Garrison trio friendship! I had a lot of fun with this and went way over anticipated word count, oops,,,,

She sneaks past patrol officers, guards, and generals, but students don’t seem to mind her if she looks like she knows where she’s going. Matt’s tour, over a year ago, gives her a vague mental blueprint of the place, but she still has some trouble navigating and ends up in the wrong building.

Katie dashes upstairs to find an outdoor balcony where she can get a better view of the Garrison. An outdoor quad lies down below; the soft class bells sounded a few minutes ago, so most students and instructors should be inside by now, but there are still a few bodies milling about on the ground floor. She has time—Iverson should be busy for at least an hour.

She doesn’t think much about the faint bass and drumbeat coming from the quad [until the lyrics start](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMa2b6ILTfo).

 

 ** _♪ FLASH! AAA-AAAHH! SAVIOR OF THE UNIVERSE_ ** **♫**

 

Katie just about jumps out of her skin. She peers down, squinting. Two boys are posing and dancing around a boom box—the thin one points his finger to the sky and the thick one has his arms thrust up into the air, heads back and mouths wide open as they lip-sync to Queen.

 

 ** _♪ FLASH! AAA-AAAHH! HE’LL SAVE EVERY ONE OF US_ ** **♫**

 

Katie raises a brow. “This is the groundbreaking work they’re doing at Galaxy Garrison?” she mutters to herself. She doesn’t watch long, and soon enough the boys are caught and ushered back inside, boom box confiscated.

Shortly afterward, General Iverson discovers Katie hacking into the Garrison system and she gets herself kicked out and blacklisted as a result.

As they escort her off the premises, Queen’s steady bass and drumbeat, quick and firm and determined, echo in her ears as she plans her next move.

 

~

 

“Hasta la later, Keith!” she hears farther down the hall.

She turns her head down a little as she keeps walking. She has to hide, make no big impressions. Someone told her to go to the assignment board and get the names of her flight simulation teammates. She rounds the corner.

The same voice. “Who the heck is Pidge Gunderson?”

It takes her a second— _oh yeah, that’s me—_ to step forward. “Right here.”

The two boys, who look so strangely familiar, turn to her with smiles and welcome her to the team. She offers smiles and handshakes. But she’s not here to make friends. Lance starts talking about going out or “bonding” or something, but she spots Iverson down the hall, and everything else drowns out.

“Hellooo?” Lance says, retrieving her attention. “Pizza? Girls? Astronauts?”

Pidge makes a face. They’re nice enough, but they’re not her focus. She’s not a student, she’s an agent, and her brother and father’s lives are on the line—Takashi’s, too.

She can’t let herself get distracted.

 

~

 

Her backpack puts an ache in her shoulders. She regrets building so much into the equipment, but it’s all she has, and she can’t do her work from her room. After evading a night patrol officer, she continues on and rubs her eyes under her fake glasses.

Tonight’s venture has been unsuccessful—aside from that word a few times, “Vol-kron” or something, all she heard was static. Empty-handed, she makes her retreat, and, so exhausted, she almost misses the soft blue glow from the dark of the student lounge as she passes by it.

Her curiosity gets the better of her. She steps inside, seeing a small television cast flickering blue lights on the opposite wall. And behind the television, as she gets closer, she finds a short mop of brown hair.

“Lance?”

He starts, fumbling to click the pause button and hide the game glove behind himself. When he sees it’s just her, he relaxes and smiles at her with relief. “Oh, hey Pidge.”

She tilts her head at him with a tiny frown. “You’re not supposed to have video games in the Garrison,” she says.

Lance gets a mischievous twinkle in his eye and accompanies it with a smirk. “Yeah, you’d know a lot about breaking rules, wouldn’t you?”

Pidge huffs. Gripping her backpack straps, she peers around the television.

“Is that… Are you playing _Killbot Phantasm_?”

“No,” Lance says. “I’m playing _Killbot Phantasm_ _Two._ ”

“Hm,” Pidge quips. “First one’s better.”

“Is not!”

“Where’s Hunk?”

“He wiped out for the night. This game makes him dizzy, anyway.”

“Huh.”

 _I should get back to work,_ she thinks.

_The night was a bust. There’s no more work to be done._

_None of this matters. These are all just distractions._

Pidge chews on her lower lip. She averts her eyes to the corner of the ceiling, glancing back at Lance. “You wouldn’t… happen to have another game glove, would you?” she says innocently.

“I don’t,” Lance says, shrugging and holding the glove out to her with a smile. “But we can take turns.”

 

~

 

“What’s in the backpack?”

“Just… notebooks. Stuff.”

“Uh-huh…” Hunk says, still suspicious. “It’s just… it looks so heavy, and you’re so… little.”

A ripple rolls down Pidge’s spine, and her pen drifts on their Results page. “Let’s get back to the experiment, okay?”

“Fine, fine,” Hunk says, defeated. “But I don’t know why you’re still scribbling in there, I already found the coordinates.” He shows Pidge the sheet he’s drawn up of their experiment notes. Pidge grabs it and reads it over.

“You… That’s it. You got it.”

Hunk shrugs it off like it’s nothing much. Pidge glances around the rest of the quiet, busy classroom, now unsure of what to do with the last half hour before the bell. When she turns back to Hunk, he’s discretely trying to peer into the small un-zippered opening of her backpack.

“Why doesn’t anyone else want to be your partner?” she whispers, finding a new topic. “You’re clearly intelligent. All these other students, they should be fighting each other to have you.”

“Dunno,” Hunk says. “Something about me puking in the simulator gear box, maybe. And the control panel. And an incident with Iverson I don’t want to talk about. But hey. If I’ve gained any nicknames from it, I haven’t heard them.”

Pidge snorts, a tiny laugh breathed past her lips. “They have no idea what they’re missing. You’re gonna be something great, Hunk,” she says.

“Thanks, dude. The feeling’s mutual.”

Pidge sits back in her chair while Hunk rummages into his own backpack. He offers something to her— a cookie. She reaches for it, a thank-you on her tongue, when he pulls it away with a smile.

“Gotta let me see inside the backpack.”

“No! Hunk, let it go!”

Pidge grabs for the cookie, but he keeps it just out of her reach. After enough yelling and commotion, their instructor barks a warning and tells them to quiet down. They settle back into their seats, flushed and embarrassed.

Hunk puts two cookies on top of her notebook before the end of class.

 

~

 

Garrison alarms fill their ears, and readings on Pidge’s equipment spike up higher than ever.

“Is that a meteor?!” Hunk shouts.

Lance’s gaze follows the bright falling flare that splits the midnight sky.

In moments, everything changes—and the truth is closer than ever.

 

~

 

After the Castle has been parked on a quiet planet, and after everyone else has gone to bed, Pidge climbs to a spot up on the hull. She sets her equipment down and sits, arranging each item piece by piece. She breathes in the nighttime air, cool and sort of sweet on this planet—explained by the rivers of sugar they found running in veins all around the planet’s surface. (Once they confirmed the planet was uninhabited, Hunk and Coran spent much of the day mining them for all they’re worth. Pidge smiles at the thought.)

Because of the planet’s atmosphere, the evening horizon reminds her more of a sunrise on Earth, pink and warm despite the darkness. But as she listens to the wind, it sounds…

Lonely.

She drowns out the deep whirling noise with her headphones and gets to work. The whirl is quickly replaced by a grainy feed of static.

_How did I get here?_

Once, all she’d wanted were answers. Now, she’s found herself out in the middle of nowhere, semi-stranded amidst unknown universes, chasing the afterimage of a single photo from a bad security feed, unable to figure out where they are or where Shiro went or where Matt and her father are, let alone how far Earth could be from them now.

_Mom. She must be worried sick._

Pidge takes a deep breath and draws her knees in. It’s times like these that she feels the universe palpably around her, swallowing her up. Like she could swim in it for centuries and never find home.

“What’cha listening to?”

Pidge looks up over her shoulder. Lance is in the process of sitting to her left, and by the time he’s crossing his legs, she sees Hunk taking a seat at her right.

She pulls off her headphones, turning them over in her hands. “Nothing, really.” When she hands them to Lance, he tries them on for a moment. “It’s… not picking up anything.”

They fall quiet. It’s not an uncomfortable silence—just an unspoken solidarity shared between the three of them. Three with stakes, dreams, hopes, fears, a mutual homesickness beyond grief. Lance doesn’t joke around; Hunk doesn’t try to touch her things. They all lay their backs on the roof of the Castle and map the stars together, wordless. Pidge’s gaze finds a trio of moons hanging in the sky, two big ones flanking a smaller one, faintly ringed.

“Well,” Lance says finally, “let’s listen to something else, then.”

Pidge watches, curious, as he digs into his coat pocket. He pulls out a small device that fits squarely in the palm of his hand.

“Hunk fixed my dead media player,” he says. “We can’t get it off shuffle, but it’s got like a thousand songs and _crazy_ battery life. We’re talkin’ this thing will last ‘til we’re old and crusty.”

“Gross,” Hunk says. “But accurate.”

Lance unplugs Pidge’s headphones from the jack in her radio equipment and hooks them up to the MP3. The feedback clicks into place. “And let’s crank up the volume…”

 

 **_♪ FLASH! AAA-AAAHH!_ ** **♫**

 

Pidge throws her head back and laughs until tears prick her eyes.

“Oh no,” Hunk starts, “Lance—she’s gone mad!”

“No, no,” Pidge gasps, holding her stomach. “No, I just… thought of something funny.”

“Funny?”

“Good,” she says. She giggles, punching her fists in the air to the victorious beat of Freddie Mercury, and the boys join her. Hunk sings well, Lance sings badly—probably on purpose—and supplies emphatic air guitar, and somehow Pidge remembers every word, every note, every scream.

She sighs, grinning from ear to ear until her face hurts.

“Something good.”


End file.
